How do you feel when you're tossing food into the garbage or the waste disposal?

Do tinges of guilt bubble in your throat? Does a soupcon of self-loathing slither around your brain, as you pour that curried cauliflower soup into an unknown beyond?

I bring you news that might assist your psychological health. For just this week, some British people from a clean-tech company called SeaB have been sliding around the Bay Area, trying to get our eco-princes to invest in MuckBusters.

These artfully named objects are containers into which you can shove your leftover spaghetti, tacos, or duck a l'orange and expect, after a little technical machination, to get electricity.

If you believe the estimates, all you need is half a ton of unwanted food to run about 150 computers. Which presents a sobering counterpoint to the impression one has that 150 people sitting at computers in the average office consume at least 150 tons of food.

Some will be wondering how this machine busts your meatballs. Well, you shove your food in at one end and it gets chewed up by bacteria. As often with chewing, a lot of gas emerges. Your friendly MuckBuster does a little filtering, gets itself a methane stream and then slips that gas through a heat and power system.

Suddenly, the leftovers from your power lunch have created, well, power.

The companies came to San Francisco this week for the Clean Tech Forum -- something that no doubt requires participants to gargle last thing at night with leftover Coors Light.

The cleansters at SeaB were clever enough, though, to come armed with fascinating local facts -- all of which, stunningly, support the MuckBuster's dollar-hauling muck busting.

For example, food is the largest single source (15.5 percent) of waste in California. Apparently, 6 million tons of food are dumped annually by Californians. This is, allegedly, enough to fill the Staples Center 35 times. Or, to put it another way, the Los Angeles Clippers from 2000 to 2011.

And if only the MuckBusterers could get hold of San Francisco's leftovers they believe they would power 22,000 homes for a year.